


the wanting comes in waves

by jonphaedrus



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Canon Compliant Major Character Death, M/M, Soulmate AU, second chapter is fixit fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 17:03:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3736723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because now, Eggsy knows there’s never going to be anyone else, not after this, and every breath he takes is one breath closer to Harry Hart never being there again and the words on the small of his back turning red, forever, just like his Mum’s had, when he was only five.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [because this fandom obviously needed something else helplessly depressing and i am to please](http://malaxis.tumblr.com/post/115976026868/aceofultron-soulmate-au-where-instead-of-your)  
>   
> 
> title from the decemberists "hazards of love"

“I’ll sort this mess out when I get back,” are the last words that Eggsy Unwin ever hears Harry Hart say to him, and it’s that split-second realisation of the words that match the ones written on the small of his back, that have been written there since the moment he was born, that leave him shaking. 

He can’t bear to say anything, because he knows that when Harry turns away from him, his face locked up, eyes steely-hard behind his eyes, that some words of Eggsy’s are somewhere on his body, and they both know this is it. They both know that. They both know this is the end.

 

 

When he was younger, Eggsy always assumed that his words were innocent and generic enough that it would be something simple and foolish—a car crash, maybe, or a heart attack. Maybe it would happen to him, dying of old age at home alone. It was fucking foolish romantic bullshit, thats what that thinking was, but he did it anyway because as a kid growing up when and where he did, you took what you could get, honestly.

Instead it’s this. Instead it’s watching Harry storm out of the house not even fully dressed and drive away, and Eggsy stands there in the empty front hall, knowing what’s coming, knowing what’s going to happen. Could he stop it—can that happen?

He’s never heard of it before.

 

 

Harry goes into the church with his jaw clenched and his body entirely on-edge, but there’s an ease to him, a lack of worry, that Merlin wonders about that Eggsy is furious with. He wishes he had some way to scream through the fucking laptop at him to just turn around and _leave_ and ain’t nobody would mind, nobody would give a rat’s ass, but Harry just walks in and sits down and sits through the entire thing before he gets up to leave.

Every moment of it is another moment that, to Eggsy, is a clock inexorably ticking down. Because, oh, fuck him, he was in love the moment he saw Harry _fucking_ Hart in his _gorgeous_ suit with his _stupid_ transitioning sunglasses but he’d figured it was just lust, just anxiety blossoming out into something warm and wanting in his chest and not this, not this of all things.

 It was different, seeing him unconscious in that hospital bed for weeks on end, growing a beard, looking half-dead, that was different. It was different seeing him on those train tracks, and knowing he’d succeeded. It was different and _worse_ , seeing the shame and disgrace in Harry’s eyes when he failed.

But this is the worst.

Because now, Eggsy knows there’s never going to be anyone else, not after this, and every breath he takes is one breath closer to Harry Hart never being there again and the words on the small of his back turning red, forever, just like his Mum’s had, when he was only five.

 

 

 _Will it be this gun?_ Eggsy thinks, when Harry ducks and rolls. _Will it be this knife?_ when one stabs Harry in the arm. _Will it be this axe?_ when he wrestles it away from the woman waving it. It’s horrifying but he can’t look away, doesn’t know what he’s looking at, is completely mesmerised and horrified and unable to move because this isn’t just Harry it’s Harry who knows, _knows_ that he’s going to die today. Die before he ever gets home.

Die before he ever sorts out Eggsy’s mess.

 

 

 

Eggsy doesn’t know why he even bothers to scream in surprise when the gun fills Harry’s field of vision and the bullet impacts, shattering his glasses, and Harry’s vitals drop to nothing. He doesn’t know why he throws himself back and screams, hoarse and broken. He knew, he knew this was coming, he knew it.

He goes to the bathroom to check anyway.

The words are red in his skin, and he’s crying, crying helplessly, broken open and raw because Harry is dead, dead and his skin knows it. 


	2. the hazards of love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Without his clothes, the words on Harry’s upper right arm are hard to miss. Come on then, Harry, they say, and Eggsy’s chest feels tight. Harry didn’t know what was coming in the church. Harry couldn’t have. The words aren’t red.
> 
> Eggsy wonders who it is that’s supposed to say them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was gonna wait like three-four days before i wrote the fixit chapter but MelodyGarnet wrote a fantastic follow-up of their own (see it in the comments on the first chapter) AND HERE I AM I DIDT EVEN LAST A DAY
> 
> title again from the decemberists hazards of love

It takes Eggsy two weeks to realise that the words aren’t red. He resolutely avoids looking at them, pretends that they aren’t there until one day he sees them and he stops, lowers the towel he’s scrubbing his face with, stares at the mirror. Stares at the words in black on the bottom of his back, stares and can’t even think as his heartrate ratchets up, _up,_ ** _up_** and it’s like he’s just run a marathon. His throat is closed, he can hardly breathe.

 _Harry,_ he thinks.

 

 

 

They find Harry as a John Doe in a Kentucky ICU, hooked up to half a dozen monitors and in a coma. His heart stopped in the ambulance—he was dead for nearly two minutes. Dead, but still here, with his head wrapped up in gauze all over the left side and a tube down his throat. Roxy grabs Eggsy’s elbow, stops him from just collapsing.

They put him on the plane back to London, to be somewhere safe, and Eggsy doesn’t take his eyes off of him the whole flight back.

Without his clothes, the words on Harry’s upper right arm are hard to miss. _Come on then, Harry_ , they say, and Eggsy’s chest feels tight. Harry didn’t know what was coming in the church. Harry couldn’t have. The words aren’t red.

Eggsy wonders who it is that’s supposed to say them.

 

 

 

 _Arthur_ , they all call Harry afterward. It feels right rolling off of Eggsy’s tongue, just like it somehow feels right to have Harry call him _Galahad_ in return. It isn’t what he had wanted or what he had planned for, but it feels oddly right—it’s right, to report back to Harry, to Arthur, to have his quiet, steady voice guide Eggsy in the field, whispered praise of _good shot, Galahad_ leaving his throat and loud in Eggy’s ears is what gets him in and out of the field every time, home safe and sound.

It’s not so bad. Arthur smiles at him, congratulates him on a job well done, and Eggsy has his movie nights out with Roxy and goes home to J.B. and his Mum and Daisy and tries to pretend that he isn’t pining.

Because he is.

Pining.

 

 

They end up kissing for the first time in a crowded tube trying to get across town when their cabs are being watched. The train is packed full, shoulder to shoulder, standing room only, and Eggsy ends up shoved against Harry’s chest, and he smiles awkwardly at the young woman who jabbed him there, but then settles, holding onto the overhead bar and sighing as he can feel Harry shifting next to him, one hand nonchalantly in his pocket.

The realisation, halfway through their ride, that Harry is trusting Eggsy to watch his blind spot, since he can’t keep turning his head to the left to make up for his missing eye, leaves him feeling buoyant and stupid, and when an elderly woman with a dog almost knocks Harry over, Eggsy catches him.

Their eyes stop. They both freeze. Harry’s face is right next to Eggsy’s, he can feel Harry’s breathing. They stare at each other.

Eggsy thinks of red words, burned into his back in Harry’s bathroom, a gunshot, _come on then Harry,_ and Harry half-smiles, leans down, and kisses him, one hand still in his pocket, the other hanging onto the overhead bar to keep his balance, and Eggsy puts one hand on his chest and kisses him back, right in the middle of the tube with the whole world watching, like it’s the most natural, regular thing in the world, and he can’t believe he never did this before now.

 

 

The first time they go to bed is after Eggsy gets shot three times in the back in the middle of the Sahara, and he comes back, covered in huge, purpling bruises of where his suit saved his life, and Arthur meets him at the front of the tailor’s and kisses him in broad fucking daylight in the middle of Saville Row, and Eggsy can almost  _taste_ the exasperation in Merlin’s voice in his glasses feed, grouching that in no way is this appropriate, but Eggsy just knots one hand up in Harry’s lapel and pulls him closer for a long, breathless kiss on the goddam street.

It’s the most-forward, least-inhibited thing he’s ever seen Harry do, and it’s fucking magnetic because he doesn’t leave the older man’s side for the rest of the day, staying in his office even while a doctor rubs something on his bruises, stays in there through all the meetings, and stays by Harry’s side until Arthur goes home, until they walk through the front door, until Harry’s mouth is slanted against his and Eggsy’s climbing him like a fucking tree.

They don’t even make it to the bed. Harry flat-out refuses to fuck on the stairs because he’s just not young enough for that any more, so they do it on the couch, Eggsy moaning brokenly while Harry leans over him, hair sweat-matted against his forehead and eyes overbright, pupils blown wide, both of their heartrates climbing and Eggsy’s bruises are gonna ache in the morning, but he doesn’t care in the slightest, because he’s clawing straight through the good linen of Harry’s shirt, and the older man comes with Eggsy’s name on his lips.

 

 

They never get married. Harry says he’s too old, Eggsy says its pointless. Neither of them is a hopeless romantic; they both know any day either one of them could die (know it well enough, know it because of the words on Eggsy’s back), so instead they move in together, take rare vacations together, make love on balconies around the world, trade signet rings instead of wedding bands, and get on like men in the business of killing get on.

 

 

 

The years pass. Eggsy gets shot far more than three times in the back, and his suit doesn’t always protect him. Other agents come and go: Merlin of a heart attack caused by too much stress, Roxy in a frankly horrific breach of security, protecting two batches of trainees (all of them survive), Gawain and Percival and Kay in mission-related accidents, Hector retires, so does Bedivere. Names get filled by different faces, but no matter how much time passes, Arthur sits at the head of the table, Galahad to his right.

Even when Harry has to give in to his knees, at eighty-seven, and take the handicap lift, they still keep going. His hands shake when he speaks at the Round Table, and Eggsy stops taking field missions after he takes nerve-damage in his dominant arm.

It’s late on a Friday night as Harry settles into the passenger seat of the car, groaning quietly, wincing as he rubs his knee and looking up into the sky back at the storefront. He still has one leg out of the car, and Eggsy sighs. “Come on then, Harry,” he says, nudging the older man to get the rest of the way into the car.

In the wake of Roxy’s death, there’s so much to do. Harry sighs, shakes his head, and slides the rest of the way into the car. He’s been working non-stop for nearly a week, trying to clean up the mess. As he buckles his seatbelt and leans back against the passenger seat, he closes his eyes and sighs.

“I’ll sort this mess out when I get back,” he says, very quietly, and Eggsy freezes, hands claw-tight on the wheel. He looks over at Harry, who has shut his eyes, his breathing slowing, evening, as he dozes off into sleep.

He likely doesn’t even realise he’s said it.

Gently, Eggsy pulls their car out of park and starts the drive back to their house, that was once just Harry’s, that has two stuffed dogs in the loo. The car is near-silent: he can hear Harry’s breath slow, even, get quiet.

He can hear it when Harry stops breathing, slips away, asleep in the passenger seat of his car, at half-past one on a Friday night, and he pulls to a stop, parked just outside their house.

He knows the words on the small of his back are red, and this time, there’s nothing that will change them back. He listens to the sound of the car winding down, to the rapid, uneven beat of his heart, and he just sits there in the car, with the love of his life gone in the way Eggsy had always _hoped_ he would (hoped but never believed because this isn’t that kind of movie) and cries, cries brokenly into his hands and the steering wheel.

Harry’s words were his all along.

**Author's Note:**

> check me out on tumblr @professorjonathanphaedrus


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